Many curious stories circulate in our
society. Some are "urban legends"--supposedly true fictional stories
that allegedly happened recently to a friend of a friend, describing
such bizarre incidents as the vanishing hitchhiker, the microwaved pet,
the stolen kidney, and alligators in city sewers. Others are alleged
"true weird mysteries" based on fictional stories passed off as "fact"
and frequently repeated in popular books and articles. These include,
for instance, the mysterious disappearance tales derived from fictional
horror stories by Ambrose Bierce. (See my article on "Vanishing
Vanishings" in The Anomalist: 7.) Another example is
the 1897 abduction of a cow by an airship piloted by six
strange-looking aliens, now known to be based on a tongue-in-cheek
newspaper reprint of a prize-winning tall tale at a small-town Kansas
"Liars' Club." Still others are bizarre rumors of limited circulation
that never achieve the ubiquitous popularity of urban legends or the
frequent rehashing of stories like the Kansas cownapping tale, and
cannot be traced to a definite literary source like Bierce's stories or
a newspaper reprint of a tall tale.

One such curious rumor that I have spent considerable time and energy
over the years trying to track down to its original source is the
"Lincoln Legend." It's a story with some supernatural touches about a
weird family of eccentric, peculiar-looking people named Lincoln (no
relation, apparently, of President Lincoln) who allegedly terrorized an
unnamed small Midwestern town in the 1890's or early 1900's. I heard
the story in 1966 from a friend who had heard it from a family friend
who had in turn heard it from one of the original witnesses or
participants. I have tried to track down the story either to an actual
original incident or to a definite literary source, but with no success
in either direction. I did a little research from time to time from
1966 to 1997, and have quite intensively researched the case since late
1997. Before I describe what I found, first let me detail just what the
Lincoln Legend is.

The Lincolns supposedly were standoffish, odd-looking people who moved
in the 1890's from somewhere in the East (possibly from Massachusetts)
to a small town in the Midwest. The father, mother, daughter and two
sons were squat and "froggish"-looking with "ugly" faces, pallid
whitish skin, bulging "hyper-thyroid" eyes, and high broad foreheads.
Their aloof, unfriendly personalities brought quick dislike, as did
their habit of prowling around the town at night and scaring townsfolk
who met them.

In 1896 or 1900, one of the Lincoln sons was lynched for raping and
murdering the daughter of a prominent local family. At the Lincoln
youth's funeral, his father declared that the town would regret the
deed, and threw a worm or slug at the girl's father, crying "Here is
your doom!" Shortly afterwards, the dead girl's father and brother died
under mysterious circumstances, their bodies crushed to a pulp and
covered with slime, and townsfolk kept having nighttime sightings of
the dead Lincoln boy. Some townsfolk who had seen the Lincoln boy's
apparition later went insane. A posse sent to open the Lincoln boy's
grave to see if his body was still there found a single set of
footprints leaving the grave. Upon opening his coffin, they
found that the corpse was gone. The Lincoln family moved out of town
shortly after the funeral, perhaps going back East. For the next few
years, however, the area suffered a succession of severe droughts,
floods and tornadoes, almost as if the town had been cursed by the
Lincolns.

I first heard of the "Lincoln Legend" as a graduate student at the
University of Virginia in the Summer of 1966, from a U.Va. friend of
mine, Raymond G. Frey (now a Philosophy professor at Bowling Green
State University in Ohio). Frey had just heard about it at a family
gathering in Kermit, West Virginia from an elderly physician who had
once met one of the witnesses of the original events. The elderly MD
had been a dinner guest at Frey's relatives' house one evening. He had
reminisced about memorable highlights of his years in medicine. Many
years earlier, the old doctor had attended a dying and delirious
patient. In his delirium, the patient had screamed "LINCOLN! LINCOLN!"
The next day, the patient was more lucid, and the doctor asked him
about the significance of the name "LINCOLN!" he had been crying out
the night before. The patient then told him the Lincoln Legend,
claiming himself to have been one of the townspeople who had known the
Lincolns. The patient died soon afterward, but the doctor said that the
patient's story was corroborated by a relative. Unfortunately, however,
Frey does not remember the name of the doctor, though I have asked him
a few times over the years.

I don't recall whether Frey specified the state where the Lincoln
Legend had taken place, or whether he mentioned the old doctor as
naming a state. Last Winter, I called up his surviving West Virginia
relatives, but none of them remembered the story nor the old doctor.

The story intrigued me, and ever since 1966 I've searched either for
confirmations or for evidence of a traceable definite fictional origin.
For years, I have fruitlessly combed historical, "true weird
mysteries," and "true crime" literature, as well as possible
science-fictional and fantasy sources of the story, but I never
discovered any printed fictional story exactly like the "Lincoln
Legend"--although many people over the years have agreed with my hunch
that the sinister, "ugly," "froggish"-looking Lincolns with their
bulging eyes resembled the amphibious "batrachian" aliens described by
macabre fantasy writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) in stories like "The
Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1931).

In late 1980, I sent a letter to Fate magazine outlining the
Lincoln Legend as Frey had described it, asking any Fate
readers who had ever read or heard of the story to contact me. My
letter was printed in the March 1981 issue of Fate, which hit
the newsstands in early February 1981. A couple of weeks later, I got a
typewritten note in the mail from somebody calling herself Greta
Gilmore of South Bend, Indiana, enclosed with a xerox of a two-page
unfinished handwritten letter to me supposedly written by her brother
Carl who had just mysteriously disappeared. Carl Gilmore claimed to be
descended from the original Lincolns, who had lived in South Bend in
the 1890's. He summarized accounts of the Lincoln Legend, basically
similar to my version and to each other though with a few differences
of detail (including different first names for the Lincolns, and
different names for the girl the Lincoln son molested), allegedly
printed in a couple of popular paperback books on weird phenomena
published in the 1960's that he had picked up a few years earlier in a
local used bookstore: Margaret Ronan's Evil This Way Comes and
John Macklin's Ultimate Dimension. Both books set the Lincoln
Legend in South Bend in the 1890's, describing the Lincolns as squat,
pallid, "froggish" folk with bulging eyes who had moved to South Bend
from western Massachusetts, whose son molested the daughter of a
prominent South Bend family. Intrigued because he was a South Bender
and a Lincoln on his mother's side, he did some local historical and
genealogical research, but found no record of the people or incidents
mentioned in the Ronan and Macklin books. A few years later, he
inherited his grandmother's house in a "decaying neighborhood" of South
Bend-- and discovered the Lincolns' records, scrap-books, and diaries
in the attic. His letter, hinting at the "fantastic, horrible,
unspeakable" doings of his "eldritch progenitors" Theo and Oliver
Lincoln, "diseased maniacs" living in a "hellish dream world," broke
off just as it was getting really interesting! At the same time, I
thought his letter read suspiciously like a story by H.P. Lovecraft,
especially with his purple prose of "decaying neighborhood," "eldritch
progenitors," "diseased maniacs," and "hellish dream world"! Carl
Gilmore's discovery of his own descent from the evil, froggish Lincolns
reminded me of Lovecraft's "Shadow Over Innsmouth," whose narrator
discovered his own descent from the sinister half-alien Innsmouth
fish-men. Carl's disappearance, likewise, recalled the disappearances,
suicides, or gruesome deaths of many Lovecraft protagonists who
discover a deep dark secret about themselves or the Cosmos.

I wrote a couple of replies to Greta and Carl Gilmore, but never got an
answer. I tried to obtain the books mentioned by Carl Gilmore as
describing the Lincoln Legend, Margaret Ronan's Evil This Way Comes
and John Macklin's Ultimate Dimension, but without success. I
dropped the matter for many years, then resumed my investigations in
the Fall of 1997. Again I wrote Carl and Greta Gilmore, but again got
no reply. I again tried to locate the Ronan and Macklin books, but
found that while both authors were real enough authors of popular
compendiums of strange happenings, the titles cited by "Carl Gilmore"
never existed. The Ronan and Macklin books I did obtain contained
nothing like the Lincoln story. I even wrote to Margaret Ronan, and she
wrote me back that she had never written, read, nor heard of any such
book as Evil This Way Comes, and never heard of the Lincoln
story. A supposed history of South Bend mentioned by "Carl Gilmore" (A
History of St. Joseph County by "Morton Shianerkof") also turned
out to be non-existent.

I got in touch with John F. Palmer, the Local History Librarian at the
South Bend and St. Joseph's County Public Library. Palmer wrote me back
in February, 1998 that he had never heard of such a case and could find
nothing like it in local newspapers or records. Palmer did send me,
however, photostats of vast amounts of information on local Gilmores
and Lincolns--both of whom were quite plentiful in South Bend. Greta
Gilmore was a real person, and her address was real, also. One night in
January 1998, I called Greta Gilmore's phone number. Her mother
answered, saying that they had gotten and read the letters I'd written
but were puzzled. Greta had no brother named Carl, and her brother had
never disappeared. They definitely had NO Lincolns in their family
tree. The whole thing had been just a hoax at my and the Gilmores'
expense by some unknown practical joker!

In the Spring of 1999, I again resumed intensive researches into the
Lincoln Legend. I wrote and/or e-mailed State and big-city libraries,
archives, and historical societies in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois,
Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North
and South Dakota, Oklahoma, and Colorado. I consulted Internet websites
devoted to urban legends. I shared my Lincoln researches with many
friends and e-mail correspondents, who gave numerous quite helpful
suggestions. I checked out numerous books on Midwestern and rural
American local and regional folklore and murders. I contacted
authorities (like S.T. Joshi, L. Sprague DeCamp, and others) on the
life and writings of H.P. Lovecraft, whose stories like "The Shadow
Over Innsmouth" I suspected might have inspired the Lincoln Legend,
asking them if they knew of any Lovecraft pastiche by one of his
admirers and imitators (like August Derleth, Robert Bloch, and Frank
Belknap Long) with a plot resembling the Lincoln Legend. I also re-read
all the possibly relevant Lovecraft stories. My query, "Lincoln Legend': An Urban Legend or a
Real Weird Mystery?" was posted on this web site with a
request for anyone with information about it to contact me. I likewise
posted copies of my "Lincoln Legend" query on a couple of non-Fortean
e-mail lists that I belong to.

I received many replies--almost all negative. Nobody had heard of the
Lincoln Legend, either as (supposed) fact or as definitely identifiable
fiction, though a couple of people wrote me that the story sounded
vaguely familiar. Several respondents thought it sounded like a story
by Stephen King. The libraries, archives, and historical societies
informed me that they could not find anything in their holdings or
records about the Lincoln Legend or any people or incidents closely
resembling those of the Legend. A few referred me to various books on
Midwestern regional folklore or ghost stories--which I checked out, but
found did not really contain anything too closely corresponding to the
Lincoln Legend. The urban legend specialists had never heard of the
Lincoln Legend. The Lovecraft scholars (including biographer L. Sprague
DeCamp, critic and editor S.T. Joshi, and editors at Arkham House)
informed me that thousands of Lovecraft pastiches have been published
in the last half-century, more than anyone could ever read or keep
track of, but that none of them recalled a story quite like the Lincoln
Legend. August Derleth's Wisconsin Murders (1968) and Stewart
Holbrook's Murder Out Yonder (1941, 1989), recommended by a
friend because of their focus on Midwestern and small-town murders and
because of Derleth's position as a leading Lovecraft admirer, editor,
and imitator, had nothing on the Lincoln Legend or any case quite
similar.

One respondent to my earlier Anomalist report/query wondered if
I was trying to create an urban legend, knowingly posting a fictitious
story "intentionally vague as to time and space" and seeing how many
people would "respond affirming some degree of its truth," like the
increasing number of people claiming alien abductions. He felt that my
story had an "artistic narrative flow," building up to a "horrific
climax," found in fictional horror stories but lacking in "'true'
anomalous incidents" as described by Charles Fort "or, indeed, in The
Anomalist." In a later post, he added that any real-life incident like
the Lincoln Legend "would have reverberated through local folklore for
decades." In our "age so starved for marvels," it would have been
"picked up and reported dozens of times," and my failure to find any
references to it despite my "diligent inquiry to various folklore
societies" was "conclusive proof that we are not dealing with a legend
as such." Daily Oklahoman columnist Robert E. Lee (curious
coincidence of names for a "Lincoln" inquiry!) at first offered
(e-mail, June 1, 1999) to print a column describing the Lincoln Legend
and asking readers for additional information. However, Lee later
(e-mail, June 9, 1999) was "convinced" we "have an urban legend," and
decided not to discuss it in his column, "because that would simply
lend authenticity to an obvious hoax."

A few respondents had possible vague recollections of the Lincoln
Legend. One member of a non-anomalist list thought the Lincoln family
resembled his maternal grandfather's relatives, "short, squat, pallid
folks one and all" (e-mail, March 16), adding that "there has been talk
of child molestation and incest to the present generations." His
grandfather's name was Lincoln, and his family had come to Toledo, Ohio
from Germany in the 1880's, though he had "never...gotten around to a
genealogy search." However, "Thanks be to G--D, my mother takes after
her mother." Oklahoma meteorologist Mike Branick, responding to my Anomalist
query (e-mail, March 25 and March 25), found
"something...that sounds familiar" in the story "though I can't put my
finger on it." He might have "once read some fictional short story with
a similar plot," or else perhaps in one of the popular books of Frank
Edwards or Brad Steiger on strange phenomena--though he could not find
it in any of his old Edwards and Steiger books. One-time Fate
staffer Henry Cole, also answering my Anomalist query, recalled
(e-mail, May 3) that in the mid-1960's, going through back issues of Fate
at then editor Curtis Fuller's request to select articles for
reprinting, he'd found one on the Lincolns. I contacted Fate
and asked them to look through their indexes for anything on the
Lincoln Legend, and they replied that the only "Lincoln" items they
could find dealt with President Lincoln and with Lincoln/Kennedy
assassination parallels. However, Cole reiterated (e-mail, May 9) that
while he recalled those Lincoln items, he also still recalled having
once seen something on the Lincoln Legend, either in Fate or
somewhere else.

A few respondents offered other interesting but inconclusive leads.
Jerry Clark at the National Archives and Bruce Monblatt of the U.S.
Office of Education suggested (e- mails, March 25) similarities of the
Lincoln family to dysfunctional clans like the Jukeses and Kallikaks
discussed in early 20th century psychology and sociology
texts--actually, families trotted out by old-time eugenicists to
illustrate the dangers of letting the "unfit" breed. Eric Mundell at
the Indiana State Library, while unable to find anything specific on
the Lincoln Legend, suggested (e-mail, March 25) that "if the account
is really based on truth, then it was likely more a matter of the local
people being scared of others who just looked and acted differently."
There "could have been some medical explanation for their behavior and
their inability to fit in with society as a whole." He added that Sally
Childs- Helton, a folklorist and ethnomusicologist colleague whom he'd
consulted about the Lincoln Legend thought it was probably a "goblin
tale," which "usually features one or more ugly, ferocious creatures
which scare people and create havoc." Later (e-mail, March 31), he
added that a colleague of Sally Childs-Helton had suggested a possible
connection with the "Jackson Whites" of the northern New Jersey/New
York border, who "may bear some similarities with the Lincolns." An
inbred mixture of Whites, escaped slaves, and Native Americans, the
Jackson Whites displayed "a good deal of albinism, squatty physical
builds, etc., that would be perceived as odd or scary to some people."
This reference to the Jackson Whites led me to reading up on these and
similar small multi-racial mixed-blood groups in rural areas of the
southern and eastern United States: the "Melungeons" of eastern
Tennessee and western Virginia, the "Wesorts" of Maryland, the
"Croatans" or "Lumbees" of North Carolina, the "Turks" and "Brass
Ankles" of South Carolina, etc. It was a fascinating, little-known
by-way of American social and ethnic history, but in the end shed no
real light on the Lincoln Legend.

In the end, I am forced to regard the Lincoln Legend as a forme
fruste of an urban legend or of a pseudo- historicized fictional
story. In medicine, a forme fruste, literally "worn-down form,"
is an atypical and usually abortive manifestation of a disease, with
one or a few but not all the typical symptoms of that disease or
syndrome. In psychiatry, forme fruste designates what Freud
called a "rudimentary" or "larval" form of a neurosis or psychosis,
with just one or two of the symptoms of a full-blown case. The Lincoln
Legend does resemble an urban legend. With its description of the
Lincoln family seemingly inspired by the "batrachian" human/alien
hybrid Innsmouth fish-men in H.P. Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over
Innsmouth," the Lincoln Legend also resembles the David Lang and Oliver
Lerch disappearance legends based on Ambrose Bierce's stories "The
Difficulty of Crossing a Field" and "Charles Ashmore's Trail."

However, the Lincoln Legend has never achieved the ubiquity of typical
urban legends like the phantom hitchhiker or microwaved dog, nor has it
been rehashed countless times in popular Fortean literature like the
1897 Kansas alien airship cownapping stories, for example. Rather, the
Lincoln Legend is an embryonic or larval urban legend that somehow
never quite managed to get off the ground, so to speak. Raymond Frey's
elderly West Virginia doctor, I suspect, must have once encountered
either an oral tall tale partly inspired by Lovecraft's "Shadow Over
Innsmouth" or an obscure, now-forgotten Lovecraft pastiche in some
magazine, and over the years confused it with some weird tale told by
one of his patients. The old doctor's delirious patient, too, might
have been the culprit, inadvertently or intentionally confusing a
Lovecraft-inspired tall tale or a printed Lovecraft pastiche with an
actual incident. Either way, we have a rumor, probably inspired
directly or indirectly by the stories of one of America's masters of
macabre fiction, that achieved a limited circulation, but failed to
quite win the ubiquity of the typical urban legend.